[HN Gopher] The Answer (1954)
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       The Answer (1954)
        
       Author : dash2
       Score  : 21 points
       Date   : 2025-10-02 18:13 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (sfshortstories.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (sfshortstories.com)
        
       | dash2 wrote:
       | Direct link:
       | https://archive.org/details/angelsspaceships0000fred/page/36...
        
         | dooglius wrote:
         | The review is only a little shorter than the story!
        
       | ajkjk wrote:
       | I think if a story gives you a sense of wonder when you're young,
       | it's a good story, even if it seems cheesy later. Probably the
       | reason it doesn't later is that you saw so many things like that
       | when you were young and they don't surprise you anymore.
        
         | antisthenes wrote:
         | I agree.
         | 
         | I would give anything to feel a sense of wonder that I used to
         | get when reading sci-fi in my youth.
         | 
         | But "can't enter the same river twice" and all that.
        
           | xmprt wrote:
           | Who's writing good scifi these days which evoke that same
           | sense of wonder? Project Hail Mary was a fun read but felt a
           | bit too in the weeds with the details.
        
             | bobbiechen wrote:
             | Gotta be Ted Chiang. Try his short story collection titled
             | Exhalation: Stories.
        
       | joblessjunkie wrote:
       | Reminds me quite a bit of Asimov's "The Last Question", which
       | mines the same "computer-as-God" vein, is also very short, and
       | has a suspiciously related title. Asimov's story appeared in
       | 1956, just two years later.
        
         | gjm11 wrote:
         | My exact thought process on seeing the title here: "Ah,
         | 'insufficient data for meaningful answer'. No, wait, that one's
         | called 'The Last Question'. So perhaps it's 'There is _now_ '."
         | :-)
         | 
         | (Asimov's is better. Also, the version of this one in my memory
         | is better than the actual story, in that "There is _now_ " is
         | better than the rather clunky equivalent in the story. I
         | suppose it's possible that I'm remembering a different,
         | slightly better written, story with the exact same idea.)
        
       | Animats wrote:
       | It's the same story as "Company Man", posted here yesterday. But
       | it was a new idea when Asimov wrote it.
        
         | dredmorbius wrote:
         | <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45443298>
        
       | rbanffy wrote:
       | You might call it weak and gimmicky all you want, but it
       | entrenched itself deeply into our collective imagination.
       | 
       | I saw many people come up independently with a direct quote from
       | this story when they saw the IBM promotional image of a man
       | standing in front of an IBM Quantum System One machine.
       | 
       | The image: https://www.techmonitor.ai/wp-
       | content/uploads/sites/29/2023/...
        
         | imglorp wrote:
         | I think humans are weak and prone to leaping on gimmicks and
         | extrapolating with limited information to wherever their
         | imagination takes them.
         | 
         | If shown a dazzling, mysterious, $10m glass cube draped with
         | all that hyperbolic "quantum future wow!!" marketing,
         | ordinarily smart people will leap to anything. In reality, QC
         | doesn't seem to have a ton of applications yet.
        
       | satisfice wrote:
       | See Arthur C. Clark, Nine Billion Names of God, from 1953
        
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       (page generated 2025-10-02 23:00 UTC)